On the contrary, to me, Acme::Playmate is a very good example of a simple
object, and it encapsulates at least those three attributes you had in your
sample code. Most importantly, the class does abstract an entity the author
perceives.

I'm with Ovid on this one. The example under discussion is just a plain
old data structure dressed up in a little OO clothing. If you remove the
bless line from the constructor, you get back a plain ordinary hash
reference that has *all* of the functionality of the so-called object. It
is useless OO, as is the following: